Guidelines:Menu Items

From KDE-HIG_Wiki

<todo>Introduction Text</todo>

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Designing Menu Items

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Guidelines

General Guidelines:

Use header capitalization in menu titles and menu items.
Use verbs or verb phrases for commands, and adjectives or adjective phrases for settings.
Keywords should be located at the beginning.
Use brief descriptions and phrases.
Offer accelerator keys for all menu items.
Offer keyboard shortcuts for prevalent menu items. Apply them in consistency with the other menus in your application, and in consistency with other KDE applications (see section Standard Keyboard Shortcuts).

Ellipses ("..."):

Use ellipsis if the command opens another window or dialog.

Icons:

Use icons in consistency with your own application, and in consistency with other KDE applications.
Use icons
- if they support the learnability by showing up the relation to the function's appearance elsewhere in the application.
- if they represent something unique within the application.
- that are significant and selective.

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Rationale

The higher the complexity of an application, the more complex is an application's menu. In order to support the user in finding the functions she is looking for, it is important to faciliate scanning by using brief and significant labels.

Accelerator keys are crucial to meet accessiblity standards for software applications, and additionally provide a fast access to the function.

If applied carefully, icons add to the learnability of an application by supporting the perceptibility of certain functions. To do so, icons have to be selective: If a number of icons does not show any significant differences, it is hard to keep them apart. As a result, learning is rather hindered than supported. The more icons you use, the higher is the danger that their significance declines. Therefore, firstly use icons for important functions which emerge at multiple locations within your application.

Often, it is not possible to decide which menu structure is best — especially in a complex application with many options. In that case, usability testing is of need. Contact usability@kde.org to get help on this.

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Accessibility Notes

Offer accelerator keys for all actions.

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Implementation Suggestions

Qt fully supports accelerators, for example with Q3Accel::shortcutKey() (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/q3accel.html#shortcutKey).

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Available and Unavailable Items

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Guidelines

Sample Screenshot

When a menu item is currently, but not generally unavailable, disable it and dim its text (gray).
When all the items in a menu are currently unavailable, do not disable the menu so the user can still open it and view the disabled items. The same applies to submenus.
When a menu item is generally unavailable, remove the item instead of disabling it.

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Rationale

An application should always clearly indicate its system state. This also applies to the availability of functions — if they are currently not available they should be disabled to avoid confusion when a user tries to select it.

Another situation is when an item is generally not available to a user. Then, the item should be removed because a disabled item implies that the user can do something to change its state.

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